Countdown to the Marketplace of Ideas: 19 Days Left

My topic of discussion at the marketplace of ideas is going to be the United States of America's dependency on oil. Because of oil, our country is engaged in two wars right now, and they prioritize the foreign policy based on whether or not we can get oil from the country we engage with. As the beginning steps of my research, I have watched two different Frontline documentaries about the United States and the effect that oil has on our country. The first film I watched was 20 minutes long and was called Colombia: The Pipeline War. The film was all about how an American oil pipeline caused violence and civil war in Colombia. Rebels attack the pipeline daily. They plant bombs at certain sections and blow up chunks of pipe and run before the military gets to the scene. Every time the pipe is attacked the military has to come to survey the damage and have to repair the pipe. A lot of the time the rebels that blew up the pipe are still waiting around hidden in the fields somewhere near the damage and will attack the military as they come to check out the damage. America's addiction to oil causes problems all around the world, and the situation in Colombia is a great example. The US doesn't even think about what is going on in the places they are drilling because all they want is the oil. Instead of researching and inventing new sources of renewable energy, the government is dead set on using up all the oil in the world before it admits it has a problem.

The second film I watched was an hour long and was called The Spill. It was about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that happened last year. The film gave a history of BP and talked about not only the spill in the Gulf but also the explosion of a refinery in Texas City, Texas and the spill in Alaska's North Slope in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. What I didn't know before watching this film was the BP had a history of cutting costs to the point where safety of their workers and of the equipment was in danger. Anyone who knew this would have seen the explosion in the Gulf of Mexico coming a mile away. In Texas City, BP cut costs in their refinery and decided not to update equipment to bring them up to the standards of the rest of the oil companies around the world. The automatic safety checks like alarms and automatic shutdown were not working and that caused the oil to fill up too much in the pipes and eventually explode. The oil was spewing from the top of the stacks like a geyser. 15 people were killed and around a 170 more were injured. In Alaska, BP decided to cut costs again and made the decision to not clean out their pipes. In order to clean the pipes they use a device called a Pig to scrape out the sediment from the walls of the pipe. BP hadn't done that for about ten years and because of that the pipes were extremely corroded and eventually burst. The only reason that the spill in Prudhoe Bay was not a huge disaster was because it happened in the winter. The snow and cold was able to cause the oil to pool up instead of flow into the rivers near the pipe. If it were to have happened in the summer time, cleaning up the oil would have been very difficult and much of it would have flowed into natural water sources and would have poisoned the land around it. The explosion in the Gulf was caused by BP trying to save 7 million dollars by cutting corners and not living up to many of the safety standards the rest of the oil world uses. This was all possible because of the laws in the United States though.

If the US were to have tighter laws about safety and cleanliness of operations for oil refining then I feel that these accidents could have been avoided. Instead, the government let a lot of things slide because they wanted to benefit from the oil that was going to be produced. The addiction we have to oil as a country has made us blind to many other things going on around us. Because we care so much about finding oil, we pay less attention to safety and are left cleaning up huge messes that should have never occurred in the first place if we would have cared a little bit about how we get our oil. It is time for the United States of America to start looking into new sources of renewable energy. There will be a day when all of the oil in the world has been burnt up and we will be left in the stone age again. We need to invest in things like wind and solar energy. The sun shines on the Earth every single day. If instead of having huge oil refineries, we have solar refineries, I'm sure we could produce more, better, cleaner fuel than we have now. The only way that we can expect this to happen though would be if we are forced to by an extreme oil shortage and that does not seem like it will happen too soon.